You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right. -- Maya Angelou

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Peace of Mind or Piece of My Mind?

This whole week is turning into a comedy of errors. Every hour seems to bring a new absurdity to light. DH called the phone company yesterday to tell them we wanted to cancel our service as of Friday. Of course, the phone company has a fancy automated message -- press 1 for this; press 2 for that. And they list an amazing array of options in that message; I know because DH used speaker phone to call them. You can press a button for all kinds of cool additional services -- even high speed internet. You cannot, however, cancel your basic phone service from the automated message. To cancel, the message said, you must stay on the line until a customer service representative is available. The message then said that there was an approximately 30 minute wait, but you could leave your name and number and the next available customer service representative would call you back.

DH left his name and number and then moved on the next absurdity. A couple of things about that one: 1) we're really lucky that DH received a relocation home buyout with his new job; the market is terrible here and our house isn't going to sell until it picks up, which could be years; 2) our house is over 100 years old, but it was essentially rebuilt from the ground up about five years ago. It had new everything, including new windows and a new roof, which we're sure of because we had the house inspected when we bought it two and a half years ago. The relocation company decided they needed to have the roof specially inspected by an inspector from Portland OREGON. That's hundreds of miles away. Our former realtor talked them out of that, but he's former now because he got so irritated with them he said he couldn't work with them!

In addition to the comedy of errors with the inspections, the relo company now says they didn't receive the notarized forms we sent them last week. The purchase of our new house, which is supposed to happen on Monday, is dependent on receiving the equity from this house, and that is dependent on those forms. The receipt is, naturally, in Texas -- because we expected them to let us know if they didn't receive the forms. And they did -- the day before the absolute deadline. We have no idea whether we'll get our new house in Texas now.

And finally, we were supposed to fly back to Texas on Friday morning (with our kitty), but now, Hurricane Ike is projected to come in on Friday night. It's only going to be tropical storm strength in San Antonio, but there are no direct flights from Seattle, so we have to connect in Houston, which may be evacuating by then, depending on the forecast. We've changed our reservation to the red-eye on Thursday night, and we have our fingers crossed that we'll make it back before they close the airport. Kitty is already locked in the bathroom to keep her from getting out (and lost) while the door is open for the movers. She's utterly miserable. If our flight doesn't happen, and it may not, there's no telling how long she'll have to stay locked in her cage.